LC039: Free Marketing Tactics for Startups

Today’s question:

Today’s question comes from Jacob. I don’t have a big budget to spend on ads, but I do have time to work on marketing. If you were only going to do free marketing plans, what would you spend time on?

Jake’s answer:

Note: I am not a big fan of free marketing tactics. The reason being because in order to be successful you need to know how much your cost of acquisition is and the easiest way to get that data quickly is to do paid advertising

That being said, not every startup has money to do paid ads. Here are some tactics you can use if you can only work with free marketing options.

SEO + Content Marketing

SEO alone will not do you any good. You can optimize for keywords and phrases but you have to match it with content marketing. The first thing you need to do is audit your website’s SEO performance. Then you need to consistently create content that matches those keywords you are trying to rank for.

Think about this in terms of what potential customers would search for on Google to find you. Take the time to do it right. Meaning, write at least one article per week that are substantial posts (no 300-400 word posts). Make sure they are posts that will be shared and that will be picked up by other industry blogs. This will also help build your backlinks (which is another ranking factor). It’s important to remember that this is a long-term strategy.

Podcasting

This can be a free option for you if you do all of the work on your own. There are a lot of solutions out there that can help you create something on your own. A great benefit of doing a podcast is that listener questions are title of your podcast and your show notes are optimized for those keywords, too. We know how our potential customers are searching for us and we can optimize content directly for them without doubling our effort.

Webinars

By running webinars you can get some traction if you are piggybacking on other people’s audiences. This is where partnerships come in useful. If you can get a great guest to help you with your webinar, someone who is an influencer, you can get a lot of traction quickly from their audience. Picking a topic that aligns with your target keywords and customers is another free, but time-consuming way to reach new customers.

You can also think about posting your product on various sites and doing some basic social media marketing through creating conversations with potential followers.

It’s important to remember that most marketing tactics that are least expensive with money are most expensive with time, and vice versa. So that’s something to keep in mind as you think about how you want to approach marketing.

Ask Your Own Question

Got questions about startups and/or startup culture? We’ve got answers. Head over to LaunchChat.io and record your own question to have it featured on the show.

TechCruch Disrupt Giveaway

We’re giving one Founder a free ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 in San Fransisco. We’re also going to cover the winner’s flight and hotel. You can enter the giveaway and get all the details at LaunchChat.io.